When Samantha Reeves, a well-regarded amateur finding her way through her freshman season on the women's professional tennis circuit, wanted to hustle herself back into shape after sustaining an ankle injury late in 1997, she said she decided to experiment with a newfangled ''all-natural'' dietary supplement, apparently on the recommendation of a friend.

The product promised to help her burn fat and build muscle, and it was readily available over the counter at health-food stores. It sounded like the answer to her prayers: a training and diet aid that would help her get fit fast and get back to the business of cracking the top 100 in women's tennis.

Instead, Reeves's decision to use the product backfired badly. Required to submit a urine sample at an event last December as part of tennis's effort to detect improper drug use, Reeves failed the test. The dietary product, it turned out, had contained Nor-Andro 19, a variation on the classic steroid nandrolone and one of the substances banned by the sport. And so Reeves, despite her argument that she had no intention of taking anything aimed at improperly aiding her performance, became the first female tennis player ever to have tested positive for steroids.

''I have never knowingly done anything that would be harmful to my tennis career,'' Reeves said in a statement that her family released after her test result was made public this summer.

The International Tennis Federation, which governs the sport, ultimately did not suspend or otherwise discipline Reeves, who was ranked No. 1 in the U.S. Girls 18's in 1996, is currently ranked 106th in the world, and is undecided about whether to accept a college scholarship or turn pro. Citing her age -- she turned 19 earlier this year -- and inexperience, and apparently accepting her assertion that she was unaware of the presence of steroids in the product, the I.T.F. instead called the embarrassing ordeal of testing, investigation and public disclosure ''a sanction in itself.''

Alun James, an I.T.F. spokesman, said the investigation ''proved Reeves guilty of taking the banned substance and, although the decision against any further punishment is arguably lenient, if caught again, she could face a life ban as a second offender.''

Reeves's case highlights a little discussed but troubling question for tennis: with the easy availability of illicit steroids, and the simultaneous explosion of fitness and muscle-building products that are sold legally but often with little warning about what they contain, how many players are trying to gain an inappropriate edge? Only one other player, Ignacio Truyol of Spain, has ever been formally detected of having used steroids.

Can tennis fairly and effectively police such use and the cheating -- brazen or accidental -- that results?

''There's tons of steroids out there, and they're not all coming from the black market,'' said Alan Jones, a pharmaceutics professor at the University of Mississippi who acts as the toxicology consultant for the company that administers drug testing for the men's ATP and women's WTA tours and for the I.T.F.

Jones said numerous high-tech or nouveau steroids are being marketed as simple food supplements and training aids and sold everywhere from the Internet to health-food stores. ''It's conceivable that a player could be oblivious to the fact that they're using something that contains an anabolic substance,'' he said. ''They think: it's natural, it's pure, it's good for me. And that is an absolute fallacy.''

Considering the plethora of legal products, such as creatine, available to athletes looking to boost their endurance, maximize their workouts and stave off flab, athletes subject to drug testing evidently cannot be too careful about what they ingest. Whether in the guise of vitamins, hormone supplements or food additives, there is apparently a synthetically engineered anabolic look-alike out there for everyone, whether the athletes are looking to raise a barbell or their tennis ranking.

While less invasive than the EPO-type injectables that recently tarnished cycling's Tour de France, or the substances muddying the reputation of the swimmer Michelle Smith de Bruin, anabolics such as norandrolone, which is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, are far from benign. And once these legal additives break down in the system, a steroid by any other name tends to turn into a steroid.

The Nor-Andro 19 in the supplement Reeves chose is a product that, according to Jones, ''is the new kid on the block. It's not a testosterone type of steroid, and the labs originally weren't testing for it. It's offered as a food supplement and marketed as a performance and training enhancer that increases muscle strength, mass and endurance.''

Jones did say he was unaware of the product's ever having been marketed as a weight-loss product.

An Increase In Testing

Tennis has stepped up its testing and the detection efforts of its anti-doping program, which is modeled on the one used by the International Olympic Committee. The I.T.F., in conjunction with the WTA and ATP tours, conducts roughly 1,000 tests each year, all of them random and 10 percent of them in locations other than the site of tournaments.

The cost to the three tennis organizations is approximately $500,000 per year, and so far, the only other player found guilty of using steroids is the 23-year-old Truyol, who said he took them on the advice of his physician when recovering from an injury.

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''No sport is immune anymore,'' said Dr. Donna Smith of Substance Abuse Management, the company that administers tennis's anti-doping program. ''Wherever you have issues of injury recovery and athletes intent on maximizing their training, you're going to see this stuff. Our window of detection is small, because most of these products clear the system within five days, and although we'd like to do more off-site testing, it's prohibitively expensive.''

According to the Reeves family, Samantha's use of the steroid was purely accidental. The only people more surprised than the player herself were her parents, Jack and Jill Reeves. Their daughter was fixated on losing weight, Jack Reeves said, and, unbeknownst to him and his wife, bought the supplement.

When the family was notified of the positive test and was asked to provide a record of every medication Samantha had ingested, steroids were not initially revealed as the culprit, Jack Reeves said. Then came a phone call that informed them of the source of the positive result: the illegal nandrolone metabolites in her system were traced to Nor-Andro 19. Just after the conclusion of Wimbledon last month, the I.T.F. announced that Reeves had tested positive for anabolic steroids.

''We thought it was good news that they'd figured out how the stuff got into her system; we thought that was the end of it,'' said Jack Reeves, who would not permit his daughter to be interviewed on this matter. ''Then we were told the review board had decided to pursue the case and test a second sample. It's a kind of guilty-until-proven-innocent process where you're dealing with a lot of nameless, faceless parties. They do hold a player responsible for whatever is in their system, and they're not particularly interested in how it got there. You'd have to be a molecular biologist to know this would occur.

''It's been a very troublesome, frustrating experience,'' he said. ''These days, Samantha won't drink a glass of water without having it analyzed.''

Jack and Jill Reeves had allowed their daughter to leave Monona Grove High School in Wisconsin for Dennis Van Der Meer's Tennis Academy in Hilton Head, S.C., after she was selected for the United States Tennis Association National Junior Team in 1995 and '96. Then, her parents let her take a year off between high school graduation in 1997 and college to test the waters on the circuit while retaining her college eligibility. They had expected to spend the first half of 1998 monitoring their daughter's progress on the WTA Tour; instead, they spent it helping her weather the six-month investigation by the I.T.F.

Suspicion Among Players

In addition to being the first female tennis player ever to fail a drug test of any sort, Reeves is also the first player to fail a test but escape the mandatory one-year suspension for players found guilty of using a Class One banned substance. On the men's side, Truyol was suspended for a year in January 1997, and Mats Wilander and Karel Novacek were previously fined and suspended after testing positive for cocaine.

If only two players have tested positive after thousands of tests, does it mean that tennis can rest assured it has no steroid problem? Some players say no.

Jim Courier, who trained his way to the No. 1 ranking and four Grand Slam singles championships without steroid shortcuts, said:

''If being big and strong were the main criteria for being a good player, then weight lifters would be the best. But I can see where this stuff might help out some of the more slight guys, because it can make you train like an animal.

''No one worked harder on their training than I did, and it disgusts me to think I may have lost matches to guys who've been juicing and cycling it out of their systems in time for competition,'' he said. ''Boris Becker once said that if he knew for sure everybody else was using steroids, then he would too; well, not me. I don't want kidney problems at 45.''

Courier recalled a poll of Olympians that asked whether they would take a drug that guaranteed a medal even if it also guaranteed terminal health trouble by mid-life: ''I think more than half of them said yes. I guess it's the James Dean thing, live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse -- and a gold medal.''

Debbie Graham, a WTA Tour veteran, said:

''I think there's a lot of it going on because of the pressures in women's sports, and not just to win. There's a lot of pressure for a woman to look fit in front of a crowd.''

Andre Agassi, who won the Olympic gold medal in 1996, said, ''Using steroids disrespects the very essence of sport, and anybody who takes them deliberately should be subjected to a life ban.''

As far as Samantha Reeves is concerned, she continued to play sporadically this year and yesterday received a wild-card berth for the United States Open later this month. ''I'm anxious to put the entire experience behind me,'' she said in a statement she gave to the United States Tennis Association.

Truyol, whose suspension ended in January, has not returned to the ATP Tour and no longer holds a ranking.

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A version of this article appears in print on August 19, 1998, on Page C00001 of the National edition with the headline: TENNIS: A Hidden Threat in Tennis; Teen-Ager's Case Points Out Over-the-Counter Access to Steroids. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe